Book Description

Excerpt from Naturalism in the Recent German Drama: With Special Reference to Gerhart Hauptmann Gerhart Hauptmann is regarded to-day as one of the foremost living dramatis. As is generally known, he has been carried along by the naturalistic movement which began to invade Germany in the beginning of the eighties of the nineteenth century, after it had already been at work for some fifteen or twenty years in France and Russia and had also penetrated Scandinavia. What is naturalism? As the word is often used interchangeably with realism, not a little confusion has arisen. The Greeks, Shakspere, and Goethe were realists. Were they therefore naturalists in the modern sense? To answer this question we must first find what is meant by "nature" in the word "naturalism." Friedrich Kirchner has pointed out the different significations of "nature" in this connection. "Nature" may first be conceived as in contrast with culture. The latter had in the eighteenth century, for instance, estranged man from nature to such a degree that men like Rousseau and Schiller gave vent to their feeling in the cry: Let us return to nature! This "Naturschwarmerei," however, is not the essential characteristic of modern naturalism. A second contrast exists between nature and character. Man should live in harmony with nature. The laws of ethics should be in harmony with the inevitable laws of nature, since man is evidently a link in the chain of natural phenomena and since the laws of our reason agree with the laws of nature. "Nature" in this case is after all an abstraction created by the human mind. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.